What I find amazing about this entire story...is that there are actually over 800,000 Americans who can pass a Top Secret clearance. To be kinda honest....if the investigators or smart guys ever drilled down into the bulk of these guys...barely 100,000 would pass the investigation.
I worked with a guy who was on the verge of getting his TS...when the investigator accidentally figured out the guy went to Honduras for 120 days approximately two years prior. Then he asked the medical guys there if this guy had been treated for anything, and their response was a STD. Naturally, that killed his clearance chances. If the investigator hadn’t stumbled onto this part of his career...the guy would have gotten his clearance.
Another thing this article doesn’t seem to recognize is that clearances last as long or longer than most drivers’ licenses - 10 years for secret, and 3 years for top secret, and 2 years for an inactive secret. A guy I know got cleared by his employer but is not working on any classified stuff at the moment - they cleared him because he might at some point in the future, and activating a clearance is quicker than getting one.
They’re probably counting both active and inactive clearances in the 854,000 figure.